tears, a cold, and fear

“To the degree you experience God’s love toward you – that He sees you as beautiful and radiant – you will be changed.” Tim Keller

Some days He hits me like the cooler of colored sugar-water they pour over the heads of winning coaches.

I am still flinging drops from my eyelashes, still drying off the face. The best moments leave me feeling a little abashed, as though I stood soaking wet in front of a crowd, and very much loved.

He whispered it between the lines. He always does this when I am sick--stuffs my nose, wears out my bones so I finally stop my incessant plodding and just listen.

Listen to how He works in the life of a woman I admire and respect, who pens bravely, gently, fiercely, honestly. This hit me today, breaking the walls I feebly construct.

I shy away from His love. As I read, I knew it. And the reasons are unbearably ridiculous. I am afraid to change. Or really, be changed. I refuse to experience His love, refuse to trust Him, because of fear. The lie, the great and powerful lie that hides behind curtains and smoke, and shouts that I am better off where I am. That I am safe. We are never safe, but in the Hands of the One who spoke stars into flame. It is a different kind of safe.

I am afraid, though. Afraid, honestly, that He won't be enough. That I will step out in faith and be left hanging, falling to my own demise of shame and failure. How patient He is to have pointed me toward it gently, clearly.

Some might sneer at this, or roll their eyes. There is no God, they say. And if there is? Well, we cannot know Him. And the Bible? Just a bunch of old stories.

Maybe so. Maybe they are just a bunch of old stories, but they are also just the Word of God, the Words that change people. The words that have inspired great things in the right hands and horrors in the wrong hands. Even these are under His sovereignty.

Some might say Christianity is wrong in so many ways. They don't know Christ. Christians, well, we are wrong a lot. We do dumb, selfish, stupid stuff. But even our mistakes have a place in all this.

This is one of those posts again, that takes directions and I cannot see where they lie. I am following Him in this, because I have no other way to go. If they only knew what it was to trust God. It is hard, so hard. But I have never seen healing like the healing God does. I have never seen giving like His. I have never seen love lived the way God lived it. For all the good in the world means nothing without love. It is no more than a blaring trumpet through which we exalt ourselves.

How can I trade the love of God for the false safety of fear? I can't. So I will continue to count and be small brave, readying for the bigger brave He might ask of me.

Do Your work in me, Father.